Monday, May 06, 2013

An organizing moral of Judaism is Rabbi Hillel's, “If I am not for myself, then who will be for
me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” to which Eli, and several others would add "If not me, who?"

If not now, when? and If not me, whom? are the two questions that no Honest Broker dare answer. David Appell at Quark Soup drives the n+1st stake into the heart of that broken image, first as farce

. . .I was talking to someone in management at a
national lab, and they told me on the QT that there is a white paper
going around high-levels in Washington, written by a space scientist
(unnamed) at another national lab (also unnamed), that warns of a 99+%
chance of an 240-meter asteroid strike on Earth in 2029.

. . . .he was recently fired
for "advocacy" -- if you can believe it -- because his paper includes
policy prescriptions to address the threat, which he estimated could
cost up to $800 billion, a number no one in Washington wants to hear.

Even worse (yes, it gets worse), there is a sealed court-imposed gag
order on him brought by a House committee, whose Republican chairman
insists more research is needed, and with the sequester there's no money
in the budget to address the problem anyway and he'd prefer it just go
away.

and then by showing how Carl Sagan, and E.O Wilson answered the accusations that they were "advocates" and not to be trusted when a churnalist tried to pin that on them. As Wilson said

It is reasonable then to ask what scientists are expected to do when
they hit upon a serious environmental problem. Whisper in the ear of a
journalist? Entirely and chastely refrain from publishing outside
technical journals, hoping the results will be discovered by
nonscientists?

In the April 5 issue of Science (appears open) Bassam Shakhashiri (2012 American Chemical Society President) and Jerry Bell (Chair of the committee drafting the new ACS policy on climate change) write

F. Sherwood Rowland was a central figure in the late–20th-century
controversy about the effect of chlorofluorocarbons on stratospheric
ozone. For years, he engaged audiences ranging from
students to members of the U.S. Congress. As an exemplary
scientist-citizen,
his focus eventually led to the worldwide ban on
these compounds. Rowland spoke to all scientist-citizens when he asked:
“Isn't
it the responsibility of scientists, if you believe
that you have found something that can affect the environment, isn't it
your responsibility to do something about it,
enough so that action actually takes place?…If not us, who? If not now,
when?

Eli's friend Andy Revkin (well we are Facebook buddies) really needs to man up. There is
not a middle to some roads. Pretending that there is, is both dangerous
and dishonest, to your reputation, and to your friends.

This, from my maybe 20 minutes of self-eddication on what I know nothing about, would be the paper to read.

A soon-to-be-upgoing satellite for star mapping -- if they borrow some time on it -- could make observations on Apophis useful to greatly improve the uncertainty on its tracking.

Seems like the mystery-paper-and-gag-order story might be claiming unlikely precision given what we know.

Prob'ly good for aerospace stocks tho'

I think someone should put up a prize for netting and releasing Apophis on its next pass, sling a rope on the thing and let it run off dragging an ion engine ...then work with whatever track it's on to do something more useful with it.

In 21st Century, better you visit the asteroid than the asteroid visits you.

And the point of visiting a tiny non dangerous asteroid we can't even detect yet, in a 50 billion dollar rocket that self destructs after 10 minunte is? Charlie Bolden's Asteroid Initiative has been judged by the space cadet community and found to be laughable. It's time for Charlie to do a 'James Hansen' on this one, but he's too used to taking his marching orders from his bosses and shitting his pants in public to 'do the right thing'.

Regarding the potential asteroid impact, I wish to point out that anybody proposing to prevent this impact shows the most astounding and unjustified hubris. What, after all, is the "right" amount of asteroid impacts? Do we know that? Would we have been pleased if the Dinosaurs had prevented the K-T Impact which helped make way for the rise of mammals? No! We don't know the "right" distribution of asteroid impacts any more than we know the "right" temperature the planet should have, so we should just let nature and economics take its sweet course, and not try to understand anything about consequences.

I agree, raypierre really has got the genre down. However I'm still interested in the substance of catastrophism, and I think the space based solutions are the credible means to proceed. As in, teach biosphere maintenence as a basic life experience. Make it real.

On a more practical level I have indentified a whole slew of booster landing sites almost right in my backyard ironically enough, that could make fully reusable large scale space flight possible. Unfortunately this makes the spectre of INTERNATIONAL reusable space flight inevitable, and there is this political thing of ITAR and even on the high seas - piracy, although in the 21st century space based economy I'm less so worried about that.

This is relevant because TODAY there is a hearing about beach closures at Boca Chica. In theory in the near future these things could launch and land anywhere with overflight permission but there is the double problems of noise and cultural perception.

Right now I'm thinking that if NASA and the DOD could give up the range or if they would approve a Shilo commercial launch pad then I could pick up the boosters in the Grand Cay district of the Bahamas for routine high inclination LEO spaceflight, and then Brownsville would be reserved for the occasional equatorial BEO (beyond Earth orbit) very large and very load highly efficient monster rocket launches, and I can pick up the boosters anywhere from the Boca Chica airbase in the keys to the cays in the southern Bahamas, which is indeed my back yard.

Then perhaps we can get on with it. I'll probably blog this later today ... I'm busy making dirt.

Because Sagan expensively deployed a PR firm , Porter Novelli , to spin the press conference announcing its debut in Parade the highest circulation tabloid in the history of printing.

And who was the Science Editor and one man peer review board of Parade at the time ?

Get back to us when you've read Science senior writer Elliot Marshall's account of the ballyhoo, " The Little Chill" which you will find in The New Republic in 1987, and Starley Thompsen and Steve Schneider's "Nuclear Winter Reappraised ", which appeared in Foreign Affairs in 1986.

Russel: Sagan (or any scientist) doesn't have to be right in order to have the right and/or obligation to speak out -- he has to think he's right and think he has something important to say that everyone else should hear. Science is always subject to review and correction, and it's often the case that it's reviewed or corrected *because* someone got loud about their particular point of view.

"...The fight over the details of the modelling caused a rift between Sagan and Schneider that never healed. When I bring up the topic of nuclear winter, people invariably tell me that they think the theory has been disproved. "But research continues to support the original concept. By 2007, models had began to approximate a realistic atmosphere up to 80 kilometres above Earth’s surface, including the stratosphere and mesosphere. This enabled me, and my coauthors, to calculate for the first time that smoke particles would be heated by the Sun and lifted into the upper stratosphere, where they would stay for many years. So the cooling would last for much longer than we originally thought."

David : The first two sources are both primary and fairly disinterested

As I remarked to Steve Scneider and others at the time , Sagan's ' Apocalyptic predictions ' amounted to a joke played on strategic policy analysts at the expense of the credibility of climate modeling , which had very little credibility to waste in 1984.

Russell, I don't have access to the letters of Nature, but your letter doesn't change the point: some scientists, like Sagan, think nuclear winter is a problem, and therefore want to speak up about it. You disagree with them, and you speak up too. So I don't see what the problem is, or why they shouldn't speak up just because some people disagree with them.

Note that the 'original concept' was that sunlight would instantly plunge to a part per million and everybody would freeze to death in , to quote the title of Saganand Ehrlich's book " ,The Cold And The Dark "

The TTAPS baseline and worst case scenarios- involvd global temperatures falling to -23 C and an overall cooling of ten to twenty thousand degree-days , - well and truly 'winter

As can be seen here five generations of better models, starting with the one Schneider used shrank the effect by orders of magnitude in both degree-day and temperature terms, but true believers in the politically front loaded neologism remain in denial about the meltdown of their cold war factoid.

The double irony is that the reality is a lot closer to what Crutzen predicted in the aptly titled 1982 Ambio article that statred the fracas: 'Twilight at Noon', and Norbert Weiner 's 1954 discussion of the climate impact of H-bomb tests

It is whether he had the right to speak out and whether it's a good thing to have scientists speaking out.

Personally, I don't see anything wrong in having scientists speak out on political issues related to science. In fact, I think it's a positive thing.

There is always a chance that a scientist will be wrong and, as you point out, airing a scientist's views is likely to start public debate.

If a scientist is wrong, other scientists can show that to be the case and the public wins in the long run.

Far more dangerous than a scientist speaking up and being wrong is the case where a scientist suspects something bad, is actually right and keeps quiet. Imagine if that had happened with Crutzen et al on CFC's.

David, there is as much distance between the popularized version of nuclear winter and the evolving scientific reality as there is between the first IPCC report and next years.

The problem was Sagan's refusal to change his mind in the face of changing models, and more empirical parameter studies about anything he had paid to advertise and preached as scientific gospel on the Johnny Carson show- Stockholm fever does strange things to people.

Russell: Even *if* there was no symmetry in the controversy -- and clearly some people disagree with you on that -- there was still nothing wrong with Sagan (or anyone) speaking out about an issue they felt was important and on which they felt they had important things to say.

David, the issue is not areopagetics- people can say whatever they please about what they publish, but as a matter of record, Porter-Novelli was paid 100 K to spin TTAPS a month before it was accepted by Science , and threw the press conference on 31 October. So from then until 23 December, no one could gainsay what Sagan was saying in Parade where he had carte blanche as Science Editor. In that hiatus he published 'Nuclear War and Climatic catastrophe ' in Foreign Affairs

How does this sort of preemptive first strike jibe with your idea of informed public dialog on important matters? As part of the disclosure rules that have evolved since, A-list journals now reserve the right to can papers in the press if authors throw press conferences to spin them in advance of scientific publication.

As a matter of record: The original TTAPS paper was peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal (Science)

Not sure precisely what

"Porter-Novelli was paid 100 K to spin TTAPS a month before it was accepted by Science , and threw the press conference on 31 October. So from then until 23 December, no one could gainsay what Sagan was saying in Parade"

When Revkin received his John Chancellor Award Jim Hansen showed up at the ceremony, and after mentioning Walter Sullivan, only slightly hesitated when he said Revkin was the "best" science journalist ever.

When Jim retired recently, he circulated a note stating he "had the good fortune of my research being reported by top science writers: Walter Sullivan..., Richard Kerr..., and Justin Gillis...."

Russell: Again, I think scientists have a right to speak out on issues they think are important, no matter what others think about their ideas or their timing. Obviously some have more resources (or position, or reputation, or...) than others. That's life. I don't see that an "informed public dialog" on nuclear winter didn't take place -- it seems there has been a great deal of dialog. The idea that scientists are supposed to hold back their concerns until some kind of consensus forms, and then they all line up on a stage and release a big report, is unrealistic, and also unwanted, because dialog often induces more dialog.

My suspicion is that some journals disallow scientists from speaking out before publication because they're trying to coordinate coverage and maximize their own public relations.

Sagan, Wilson are hardly the only scientists who have acted as advocates for political issues.

Edward Teller is probably the biggest of them all, the "Father of scientist political advocacy", as it were.

But, unfortunately, unlike the case of Sagan (which was actually based on peer reviewed science published in open journals), much of Teller's advocacy (and that of other "weapons technicians", as Freeman Dyson has referred to them) was shrouded in secrecy, based on classified information not available to the public for open scrutiny.

Perhaps Russell has published harsh criticism of Teller's advocacy in addition to that of Sagan?

"The scientist who directed nuclear X-ray laser research for President Reagan's "Star Wars" program says physicist Edward Teller and a fellow scientist, Lowell Wood, have conveyed "overly optimistic, technically incorrect" information about the laser research to the nation's top policy makers."

"Roy D. Woodruff, former associate director for defense systems at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, also charges that Roger E. Batzel, the laboratory director, "was fully aware" that Teller's information was inaccurate but refused to send "correcting technical information" to Washington."// end La times quotes

And it was hardly the first time Teller had been an advocate for a project for which false claims had been used in the sales pitch;

"Actively supporting the [Project Chariot] proposal, Dr. Edward Teller, 'father of the hydrogen bomb' and director of the Radiation Laboratory, suggested that the AEC detonate a 2.4 megaton atomic device on t he northwest coast of Alaska in the region of Cape Thompson. Such an explosion would create a deep water hole to be used as a harbor for the eventual shipment of coal, oil, and other non-renewable resources thought to exist along this part of the coast."

"it was not until the spring of 1960 that official representatives of the Atomic Energy Commission came to the village to explain the details of the proposed blast. Foote described what happened in his follow-up report to the AEC:

To the detriment of the Commission and Project Chariot, the officials who spoke in March, 1960, made several statements which could not be substantiated in fact. Among other things the Point Hope people were told that the fish in and around the Pacific Proving Grounds were not made radioactive by nuclear weapons tests and [there would not be]... any danger to anyone if the fish were utilized; that the effects of nuclear weapons testing never injured any people, anywhere; that once the severely exposed Japanese people recovered from radiation sickness...there were no side effects; that the residents of Point Hope would not feel any seismic shock at all from Project Chariot; and that copies of the Environmental Program studies would be made immediately available to the Point Hope council upon the return of the AEC officials to California."

Russell's "Porter-Novelli was paid 100 K to spin TTAPS a month before it was accepted by Science , and threw the press conference on 31 October. So from then until 23 December, no one could gainsay what Sagan was saying in Parade"

is a red herring with regard to the peer reviewed science.

Just whom Porter-Novelli was supposed to have been "spinning" (surely not the peer reviewers or editors of Science) is not clear, but the comment gives the impression that Sagan was somehow "up to no good" (unethical, etc), when all the actions really imply is that Sagan was being shrewd.

He knew that if his detractors simply dismissed the Parade essay as "unsubstantiated, politically motivated alarmism", they would be embarrassed a month later when the peer reviewed paper came out in Science.

"He knew that if his detractors simply dismissed the Parade essay as "unsubstantiated, politically motivated alarmism", they would be embarrassed a month later when the peer reviewed paper came out in Science"

Which is to say he exploited the publication cycle to preempt substantive criticism long enough to pontificate in Foreign Affairs , with an article that also went to press before TTAPS appeared.

It took Steve Schneider and Starley Thompson two full years to sort out the 'sophisticated one dimensional model and publish " Nuclear Winter Reappraised ' in Foreign Affairs in 1986

Oreskes and and Conway show an odd aversion to interviewing critics of TTAPS, myself included, This may reflect Conways employment as court historian at the NASA lab where the model originated.

But sustained semantic aggression is no substitute for disinterested historiography, and it is ironic that Oreskes, as part of his climate reality project, never bothered to ask Al Gore about the outcome of the debate featuring a team headed by Tom Ackerman, the 'A" in TTAPS, versus Schneider and myself at he two day 1987 Virginia Tech symposium ' Is Nuclear Winter Real and Relevant ?"

I suggest you read cotemporay accounts of the matter for perspective, especially Eliot Marshall's 1987 New Republic TRB column, 'The Little Chill', which astutely compares the hype surrounding nuclear winter and Star Wars and concludes them to be the two best orchestrated myths of the late cold war.

David- I see the IEE story on the Virginia tech event is not online, so I'll try to summarize from memory- Having listened to both sides, with his father , old Senator Gore , moderating, Al concluded that rather than being the 'robust' proposition Sagan said it was, nuclear winter appeared under cross examination too uncertain to displace the strategic policy assumptions of the day.

A host of serious people agreed with his judgement, which time proved reasonably astute, for the more the matter was studied and the more realistic the models became, the smaller the predicted effect became.

By the Nineties , all that was left of it was a forgetble video game called 'Duke Nuclear Winter"

But I suppose we can't rule out that Sagan was "controlling" the publication time of the TTAPS paper in Science vis a vis the article in Foreign affairs with the help of the editors of the two publications. After all, conspiracy theorizing is not always incorrect.

But I can't see that it would really have made much difference to those making "substantive" criticisms if the Foreign Affairs article had come out shortly after the Science paper (eg, in Winter, "84 issue) rather than shortly before it.

Those who are interested in making substantive criticisms are going to base their critique on the science, not the politics, which means they are going to do it from a reading of the scientific paper, not Foreign Affairs.

So, Schneider et al had to wait a month until they had the peer reviewed scientific paper in hand.

The mere fact that it took Schneider substantial time to "sort things out" actually means that the scientific issues are not the kind of things that some political hack is going to be able to get in a few months (if ever).

But I notice that did not stop you from publishing a rebuttal letter in Foreign Affairs in Spring of '84. Perhaps you are just better/quicker than Schneider at sorting things out?

Finally, I hear only crickets on the question about criticism by you of Teller's "false fact advocacy".

David,

Despite that fact that the TTAPS paper was peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal, Russell has characterized the entire thing as politically motivated conjecture: "a politicization of science sufficient to result in the advertising of mere conjecture as hard fact"."What is being advertised is not science but a pernicious fantasy that strikes at the very foundations of crisis management, one that attempts to transform the Alliance doctrine of flexible response into a dangerous vision."( RussellSeitz, "In from the cold: 'nuclear winter' melts down", The National Interest, 5, Fall 1986)

Despite his denial of conspiracy theorizing (eg, in a letter to Science), it's hard to escape the conclusion that Russell actually believes the TTAPS paper was at least part of some "loosely knit coordination" by the anti-nuclear-weapons (aka "peace") movement (which was a little more tightly knit in the case of the editors of Science and Foreign Affairs, who coordinated the timing of their publication of Sagan's work to maximize impact, of course).

Arguments based on such assumptions are really hard (if not impossible) to counter with logic and facts.

I actually remember the "Nuclear Winter" debate, as it took place when I was in grad school and actually had time to attend the occasional colloquium.

It seemed a fairly cogent argument to me until I actually attended a seminar advocating the scenario given at Fermilab. It was then clear that the advocates of the theory were positing that nukes would be used in ways that simply didn't make sense strategically.

I do not impute bad faith by either side. I do think that both sides were swayed by preconceived notions and ignorance of fields outside of their expertise.

Being scientists imposes multiple roles and responsibilities on us. On the one hand, we are "experts" who understand a narrow area better than just about anyone else. On the other hand, we are citizens who have a responsibility to ensure the public exercise their democratic responsibilities with the best information possible. There is no guarantee that the various roles will not sometimes pose risks for each other.

Sagan asked for, and got 'accelerated publication" at Science , perhaps aided by the fact that the "Biological Consequences' companion paper, featured several former and one future AAAS President among its coauthors., all of whom participated in Sagan's DIY review conference at the American Academy in 1982. You'll find the footnotes in 'In from the Cold ' in the Summer 1986 issue of The National Interest

You are also mistaken as to Foreign Affair publication schedule- the CFR under Bundy published a fairly leisurely quarterly, and Sagan's article went to press well before Christmas1983- hence Sagan's attribution to Science of details that failed to pass peer review and never appeard in the companion article. . Yes, I did beat Steve Schneider to the punch by calling TTAPS into question in FA two years before he and Thompson fisked it there.

David, as to the outcome of the play , could ypu please tell us which NATO nations were scared into unilateral disarmament or rejecting theater weapons deployment by the prospect of freezing to death in the dark ?

While Sagan and Turco wrote a book claiming credit for the cold war's end , it's hard to think of any historians, Frankfurt School included, who credit the nuclear freeze movement with the Soviet crack up.

Apologies to Eli for scaring the bunnies by turning his warren into a bomb shelter, but with enough carrots ...

"scientists have a right to speak out on issues they think are important, no matter what others think about their ideas or their timing" seems to be the essential issue when it comes to advocacy.

One ventures onto very shaky ground once one starts setting "science chops" standards. What are the standards and who decides?

Ray,

Thanks for pointing out that Sagan is not as evil and calculating as some on this thread appear to believe he is and that he actually did make important contributions to science and science education (and to getting humans to recognize how foolish the huge stockpiles of nukes were, for that matter).

Don't really disagree with that. Eli's take being specific to Sagan, that he was a genius at talking to the public, but a lot of his science was shaky. The best twofer out there, was of course Faraday, maybe Feynman, more recently Hansen. The point about them, is they were almost always right.

Now some, not Eli to be sure, might put Neil de Grasse Tyson into the Sagan box, but AFAEK, Tyson has a better track record.

Russell, "...prophets of doom who fail to deiiver seem a permanent feature of the historical landscape."

This reminds me of the guy who was blown off the top floor of the Empire State Building. As he passed the 50th floor on the way down, he was heard to say, "So far, so good!"

Prophets of doom never fare well in histories--there's no one left to write them. I would suggest that perhaps one should not be so sanguine given how hard scientists and engineers are working to stave off doom.

' Apocalyptic rpredictions require , if they are to be taken seriously, higher standards of evidence than do other matters where the stakes are not so great..... the extinction of Homo sapiens cannot be excluded "-- Carl SaganForeign Affairs 1983

"These results are robust "-- Carl SaganForeign Affairs 1984

Policyrecommendations laid out in Foreiqn Affairs(winter 1983/1984) rested on data publishedsimultaneously in Science (23 December1983, p. 1283). But, as noted in theScience article, "details may be found in(15)." Reference 15 states in full: "R. P.Turco, 0. B. Toon, T. P. Ackerman, J. B.Pollack, C. Sagan, in preparation." It refersto a paper that has never been published in apeer-reviewed (or any other) journal. [ Council For A Liveable World President & MIT professor George] Rathjensalso grumbles about the hard-to-getdata. The entire thesis, he says, is "a house ofcards built on reference 15."Turco, chief modeller for TTAPS, acknowledgesthat the work cited in reference15 was not published in a journal."

But they do know how to ask the right questions (about mother Nature, not human nature).

I suspect that by that standard, Sagan (eg, for his questions about the atmosphere and surface temperature of Venus, dust storms on Mars, possible water under the surface Europa) and by the standard of actually being basically right about his hunches on the latter, Sagan would actually be head and shoulders above many of his detractors (including some in this very thread).

Russell wrote:David, as to the outcome of the play , could ypu please tell us which NATO nations were scared into unilateral disarmament or rejecting theater weapons deployment by the prospect of freezing to death in the dark ?

Irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Like anyone, Sagan had the right to speak out on topics he felt were important. Unlike most (including you), Sagan had a reputation as an insightful scientist and a record of understanding planetary climates.

He certainly didn't need your approval of his idea, or anyone else's, before making his concerns about a very important issue public. Nor do I see any harm that came from doing so -- on the contrary, it spawned more discussion and investigation, and no doubt led to some rethinking the idiocy of the nuclear arms race.

Sagan's scientific record (eg, on Venus) speaks for itself, but the fact that Russell is still harping on the "timing" of Sagan's publications 30 years later tells you far more about Russell than it tells you about Sagan.

And even scientists as great as Einstein get things wrong (not only his later stuff on unified field theory, but also in his work leading up to general relativity)

That's actually to be expected from a scientist who is asking questions that few are asking and challenging common assumptions that few are challenging (eg, about conditions on the surface of Venus).

I hesitate to site Thomas Gold as another example, lest some start attacking him as well for his theories on abiogenic oil.

Note that the subject of the sentence ~@:> harps upon is 'what is being advertised ', not what Crutzen and Weiner theorized years befor Sagan's media campaign.

The article selectively quoted says pages earlier that the campaign was merely the sociology of science in action, citing C.P. Snow's 'invisible colleges 'meme and stating flat out that "no conspiracy theory is necessary, , the money quote being " having known sin at Hiroshima, science was bound to run into advertising sooner or later ", so ~@:> gets the Godwin

As to where the theory comes from , while Carl & Co tried to lay it at Owen Toon's door with the martian dust storm analogy, the fact is that Carl insisted it was all about smoke not dust, which makes Christopher Anvil the father of nuclear winter for authoring ' Torch' a story in which the cold war is rudely interrupted by the threat of an ice age when a Soviet H-bomb test ignites a Siberian oil field producing a globe enshrouding cloud of soot.

Since Sagan went on to write Contact , it is left to the reader consider whether he read the issue of Astounding Stories in which that sci fi classic appeared.

~@:> also left out the unfunny bits, including the abduction of Soviet climate physics modeler and 'nuclear winter' spokesman Vladimir Alexandrov, who , after flubbing his lines at a nuclear free zone rally in Spain in 1985, was delivered to the Soviet embassy in Madrid , bundled into a van and driven off into the night never to be seen again.

As a physicist subscribing to the principle that physicists should not shoot other physicists, I think that to have been a Bad Thing , and wish more people would harp about it , partially in folorn hope of the Russians shooting the parties responsible, but mostly to remind us that , thank God, they don't make climate wars like they used to.

I can see where any scientist has the right to speak out on a policy matter that concerns him/her. On the other hand, I think a scientist has a responsibility not to present speculative or unestablished science as if it were established science. I don't know if Dr Sagan behaved properly on the Nuclear Winter issue, but I have a physicist friend who complained bitterly about him blurring the lines on established/speculative in Cosmos. And all of my acquaintances who are historians of science curse his name routinely.

On the other hand, I think a scientist has a responsibility not to present speculative or unestablished science as if it were established science.

Established science? Just using that term sets you up for serious bashing, but I don't happen to feel a responsibility to bash your total misunderstanding of what science is. I think you are referring to something that would be better referred to as acceptable previous scientific results, subject to debate or bashing if you like. Nuclear winter isn't an issue, nuclear weapons are. When you have experimental verification of some form or aspect of nuclear winter, science will be the last thing on your mind. That was Sagan's point. He felt it was better to raise the spectre of nuclear winter well before it was tested in practice.

kT - not all science is as clear-cut as the basics of climate science and evolution, but on a lot of issues an expert would know if his or her opinion is the distinct minority opinion. When communicating to the public, the expert shouldn't hide that fact.

I would distinguish between science popularization versus science communication for policy reasons. The job of the former is to instill a sense of wonder of the cosmos and general interest in science. I'll forgive a lot more error in that former case than the latter one.

I loved watching Cosmos as a kid. I doubt I was harmed by any mistakes in it so long as it was mostly correct. Science and policy is a different issue though.

Dude, there is no 'majority opinion' on nuclear Armageddon, nuclear winter or any other aspect of globally catastrophic cosmic or human impacts, and to suggest that there is reflects your misunderstanding of science to such a degree that I am unwilling to even comment on it. In this realm it is truly 'every man, woman and child for him or herself', and so I don't value your opinion in this realm more or less than anyone else's, but I certainly did value Mr. Sagan's input on the subject when he gave it. I mean seriously, get real. This entire conversation in this thread is basically laughable, especial with the popcorn gallery pops and and claims 'all my friends are science historians and they all hate Carl Sagan'. Truly entertainment for the gifted, that.

"Our results have been carefully scrutinized by more than 100 scientists in the United States, Europe and the Soviet Union. There are still arguments on points of detail. But the overall conclusion seems to be agreed upon: There are severe and previously unanticipated global consequences of nuclear war-subfreezing temperatures in a twilit radioactive gloom lasting for months or longer.

"Scientists initially underestimated the effects of fallout, were amazed that nuclear explosions in space disabled distant satellites, had no idea that the fireballs from high-yield thermonuclear explosions could deplete the ozone layer and missed altogether the possible climatic effects of nuclear dust and smoke. What else have we overlooked?

"Nuclear war is a problem that can be treated only theoretically. It is not amenable to experimentation. Conceivably, we have left something important out of our analysis, and the effects are more modest than we calculate. On the other hand, it is also possible-and, from previous experience, even likely-that there are further adverse effects that no one has yet been wise enough to recognize. With billions of lives at stake, where does conservatism lie-in assuming that the results will be better than we calculate, or worse?"

David, why doesn't it bother you when a science editor does an end run around peer review to self-publicize his own conclusions?

"Our results have been carefully scrutinized by more than 100 scientists in the United States ..."

Note Carl never said they endorsed his views . On interviewing those involved it emeged that he sent the paper to 100 people of his own chosing, edited down the replies and forwarded only the ones he chose to the editors of FA and Science to secure the 'accelerated publication '' he requested. The mind is repelled by what Watts, or Singer might have accomplished given equal latitude.

" the overall conclusion seems to be agreed upon: There are severe and previously unanticipated global consequences of nuclear war-subfreezing temperatures in a twilit radioactive gloom lasting for months or longer."

No independent study ever reproduced that overall conclusion, and Sagan's persistant stonewalling as to that fact was his eventual undoing. Sagane insisted in FA that any nuclear exchange " even a pure tactical war in Europe say" would produce the publicized outcome. A year later Ted Koppel asked him on Nightline if nuclear winter would produce effects analogous to the K-T asteroid impact and extinction event ; "Exactly " Carl replied .

Given the six order of magnitude disparity between Nato's theater arsenal and the K-T event-- 100 megatons versus 100,000,000nobody seconded his opinion.

Not long after, Saddam Hussein set fire to a thousand oil wells in Kuwait, sending teragrams of soot into the atmosphere , and Ted Koppel had Carl back to foretell the consequences of the holocaust, whereupon, on prime time , Carl predicted the collapse of the Asian monsoon and millions perishing of famine.

How many of Edward Teller's claims about "SDI" (eg, nuclear pumped X-ray laser) were peer reviewed? (in the open journals where everyone could see and evaluate them. Claims of "classified peer review" don't count because they are not amenable to verification and can be readily misrepresented)

How interesting that Russell has nothing to say about the unpublished "sweet nothings" that Teller was whispering in President Reagan's ear (direct inspiration for Reagan's crackpot "umbrella" idea to, as he put it, "render harmless virtually all nuclear missiles anyone might fire at us").

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they occasionally heed his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.